Epilogue #2
Lance needs to close his open mouth before a whole-ass bird flies in there. “I’ve known you for a decade and have never once seen you in a bikini.” He shakes his head slowly. “I genuinely thought you were born in a very small pantsuit.”
“Lance.”
He holds his thumb and forefinger close together. “Like a tiny business infant.”
Vesper exhales as she sets her towel down. I swear she mutters something like “this was a mistake.” Then, out loud and clear: “Callen, Sylvie. May I have a word?”
Sylvie groans.
“We said no work. It’s a family vacation, Vesper. We made a rule. Eden wrote a memo. Can we just be people for a day?”
“It will take one minute,” Vesper assures us.
We walk down the beach, following our boss out of earshot from the rest of the team.
Thirty yards, maybe forty, out past where the voices carry, the three of us stand at the edge of the water with the tide coming in cold over our feet, and Vesper waits until we’re both looking at her to speak.
“I received a call this morning.”
I know from her face. Two years of that face, and I know.
Sylvie’s hand finds me; she weaves her fingers through mine.
“Bridget Salisbrie was found dead two nights ago.” She looks out at the water. “On her brother’s yacht, off Saint Thomas. She’d been aboard, dead, for about a week.”
I don’t feel anything but relief.
That’s not true. I feel a great many things and none of them arrive in an order I can report. Anger. Robbed. I wanted to be the one to exact revenge. Also, I’m glad I wasn’t the one to find her. I just want the bad guys buried, and the happily-ever-afters to begin.
The beach keeps being a beach. The water keeps coming in over my ankles. When my curiosity breaks the surface, I ask, “Suicide?”
“No.” Vesper doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely a hit.”
“How do you—”
“Because of how it was done.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
“What this now means is—with Salisbrie gone, and the black box secured—Belai can begin to live. He can do press. He can do interviews. The book comes out in March and he can put his name on it and stand in a room with his face uncovered, and speak.” Her jaw moves.
“We will maintain contract security on the family indefinitely. But for the first time in three months, I think they can all breathe.”
“That’s good news,” I manage. “Vesper, that’s…that’s all we could’ve hoped for. And we didn’t even get our hands dirty to do it.”
“It is. Salisbrie paid the price.”
“She deserved it.” It comes out flat and I don’t apologize for it. “However it happened. She deserved every minute of it… How did she die, though? You said it was a clear hit.”
It doesn’t surprise me. We’re just one of many stories Bridget Salisbrie was trying to erase.
Vesper does not look at me when she answers. She looks at Sylvie. “The coroner’s report says she was drugged. That’s likely when the attacker fastened her to an iron chair with zip ties. All four limbs.” A pause. “They found her dead in a small linen closet.”
I whistle low.
“That’s—okay.” I rub the back of my neck. “That’s a special kind of hate. Somebody wanted her to sit there, starve, and think about what she’d done.”
“Mm. Apparently. But she didn’t starve.” Vesper is still looking at Sylvie.
“Heart attack, they believe.” Her voice stays completely level.
“Actually, that isn’t right either. Every organ in her body simply stopped, more or less at once.
Like her heart and lungs were paralyzed.
” She tips her head. “The coroner found it peculiar.”
The water comes in around our ankles again, sending a chill up my spine. Yeah, that’s freezing.
“What was also peculiar is that there were stings,” Vesper says. “Up and down both arms. Both legs. The throat.” She lets that sit. “Dozens of them.”
Nobody says anything.
“As though an army of lethal scorpions had attacked her.”
Beside me, Sylvie kicks a splash of water out into the ocean. “Strange,” she says. “But sounds like it was relatively quick.”
The tide comes in making a loud whoosh and drowning out our breathing for a moment.
“Sylvie,” Vesper says.
“Yes?”
“I need to confess something to you.”
Sylvie turns her head. “What?”
“Those earrings are your mother’s.” Vesper’s eyes go to Sylvie’s left ear, then her right. “That was true. Every word of it was true and I would not have lied to you about her.”
“But?”
“But I put a tracker in them. A very small one. It has been transmitting since the morning I handed them to you across a tablecloth.”
Silence.
“So when I tell you that I know all the places you have been, I mean it.”
She lets that sentiment, or threat, perhaps, reside for a beat.
Sylvie swallows. “Cool. I mean…yeah.”
Vesper adds, “Bring them to the office next week. I’ll have the tracker removed. I don’t need to watch you anymore. These past few months…you’ve earned a longer leash.”
I watch her do it. I watch her throat move and I watch her eyes come sideways to mine, quick, checking, and there is a naked flash of something in them that I have only seen twice before.
“Thank you.” Sylvie drinks up the praise with a smile on her face. Vesper’s approval means a great deal to all of us. I don’t know if Sylvie ever thought she’d have it.
Vesper looks at her for a long moment. Then she winks. “Right.” She stretches her arms overhead. “Well, I’m going for a swim.” She’s already walking away from us, but turns and asks: “Who’s coming?”
Sylvie’s in the water before I am.
She goes in like she goes at everything. Straight. No hesitation, no toe-testing. She’s screaming before she’s waist-deep because it is freezing, and she keeps going anyway.
Vesper walks in like she’s entering a boardroom, with steady, confident strides.
I follow them both until the water hits my knees. Shit. It’s cold enough to stop your heart.
I’m shouting. Sylvie’s shouting. Vesper submerges to the shoulders and turns around and says something to me that I don’t hear over the noise I’m making, and then she starts to laugh.
Vesper is laughing.
They come in one at a time, all of them.
Cricket first, at a dead run, because Cricket cannot let her sister be tougher than her.
Eden with her hands up over her head, squealing.
Linc, still loudly explaining that he isn’t going to, walking farther in.
Lance absolutely last, howling, calling all of us a word I won’t repeat, going under anyway.
Somebody dunks somebody. There’s an argument about a jellyfish that turns out to be a bag. Sylvie gets on Cricket’s shoulders and there’s a chicken fight and it goes about how you’d expect when both participants are professional killers.
I get Sylvie by the waist and pull her back into me, her spine against my chest, and I put my chin on the top of her wet head and hold her there while the ocean shoves us both around.
She’s shaking with cold. She’s laughing.
I look up.
The whole sky is turning colors as the sun sets. It isn’t red and it isn’t orange. It’s something softer and stranger than that, and it gets into the clouds and turns them the color of the inside of a shell.
I know this sky. I missed this sky. Full of bad memories, but full of good ones too.
I spin her around, bend down, and I kiss her. Just to savor the moment. She tastes like salt. She’s cold everywhere but warm where our bodies touch in the middle. She goes up on her toes to reach me and her hand comes out of the water and finds the back of my neck.
Then I look up again.
Behind us, Lance is losing an argument. Vesper is floating on her back with her eyes closed. Somewhere on the beach a phone is ringing and not one person is going to answer it.
“What?” Sylvie’s got her face tipped up, following my eyes. “What are you looking at?”
I hold her tightly against me.
“Pink skies.”